Aprilia against Marquez
By winning the first three races of the 2026 season, Aprilia positioned itself as the bike to beat and Marco Bezzecchi had taken the lead in the riders’ championship. But after the Italian’s victory at Mugello at the end of May, there was a real collapse for the official Noale team, with Marc Marquez quickly climbing back by winning 3 of the last 4 races.
Martin is still the championship leader with 208 points, 14 points ahead of Ai Ogura who leads the Aprilia of the Trackhouse team, but Marc Marquez is quite worrying at just -18 from the leader.
According to Carlo Pernat, the favorite for the title is now Marquez himself and no longer Martin or Bezzecchi.
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Pernat on Bezzecchi and Martin
In an interview with the Germans of Speedweek, Carlo Pernat clarified a concept already expressed in the exclusive with FormulaPassion.it, when he said that in the Aprilia box “they were looking at each other with hostility” after the Balaton Grand Prix accident.
“Before, the team was like a champagne bubble, everything was going well“, emphasized the Genoese manager, specifying: “Since Hungary, everything has gone wrong. In the team, they throw dirty looks, the riders don’t talk to each other, the track engineers don’t talk to each other. The atmosphere is now bad, in a way the vase has broken”. In short, according to Pernat, after the accident caused by Martin at Balaton, relations with Bezzecchi have cracked.
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Pernat then highlighted a certain selfishness on the part of Jorge Martin: “He wants to win at all costs. He doesn’t care at all about his teammate. You saw what happened with Bonora and the others…”. And Bezzecchi’s moment is not easy either: “Now he is under pressure from Martin within Aprilia and from Marquez. He has a double pressure that he didn’t have last year”.
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